Excavating the secrets, scandals, and untold stories hiding below the surface of life, and giving voice to the characters who make or made those hiStories happen.
This week, Sarah was featured on the ever-popular Florence culture blog, ArtTrav, which dishes up regular tasty morsels on all things Art, Travel & Life in Italy to a devoted following of Italianophiles. And who isn't, really?
We thought you might like to give it a read...
Six Things You Might Not Know about Michelangelo
There are many ways to engage with Florence – from the whirlwind tour of the first-time visitor to the microscopic examination of the repeat visitor intent on peeling back history’s layers to peek below the surface. Take Michelangelo. Everybody knows who he is. His David has drawn tourists to Florence for centuries. But understanding the context in which Michelangelo sculpted the iconic Florence landmark will introduce you to a vibrant society of rivals, teachers, friends, and foes – all of whom helped to shape Michelangelo’s life and art and are certain to enliven your next trip there. Here are six lesser-known Michelangelo facts and how to learn more about them when exploring Florence.
There comes a time in the life cycle of any creative endeavor, whether it be a book, film, or interactive tourism app/digital book, when it must be allowed to venture forth and take on an existence beyond its creator.
Ironically, this often coincides with the point when the creator can’t bear to live with it anymore.
She has birthed, nurtured, examined, revised, tested, corrected, and tweaked the project until she can no longer see it clearly. Still, she carries on polishing and buffing the stone, fretting over the flaws in the marble. She questions this color choice, that turn of phrase, and every navigational decision in between.
But there are deadlines to meet and promises to keep, so ready or not, out it goes. With a deep breath, a kiss, and a silent prayer, she pushes “send” on the submission. Then, she suddenly, desperately wishes she hadn't.
A year ago this month, Mary Hoffman delivered her initial story treatment for Time Traveler Tours & Tales launch title, In the Footsteps of Giants. That's when our treasure hunting, Round 1, began!
In my last post, I wrote about how I found the voice of Time Traveler Tours thanks to a perceived failure. But the learning did not end there. Not by a long shot. It took another misstep en route to preparing our newest title, IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS, to make us realize we had not yet cracked the code as to who our characters should be, and what stories they should tell.
It was another lesson learned by trial and error on our way to developing our mission and vision for Time Traveler Tours & Tales...
All the creative assets are completed and loaded into the app; all the pages are designed; all the buttons added; all the images are hotspotted. Everything is wired together. Three rounds of beta-testing have brought excellent changes and primed the engine.
All that's left is to write the App Store Meta Data. But here's the rub: I'm hopeless with metadata.
Metadata is "data that describes other data." And that's the kind of definition that just makes this already very tired head spin. More to the point: It's keywords and other snippets of information that make it possible for you to search for and locate a specific document in the intertoobz.
